Floods cripple Pakistan once again

Floods that devastated a huge swath of Pakistan last year, have returned, destroying or damaging 1.2 million homes, flooding 4.5 million acres of prime farmland and damaging the lives of nearly five million people.

Torrential monsoon rains that have been pounding southern Pakistan since early August have already killed 270 people and are threatening to cripple the agricultural industry in Sindh province, which is widely regarded as Pakistan’s breadbasket.

Weeks of rain are already estimated to have destroyed 13% of Pakistan’s crucial cotton crop and forced the country’s cash-strapped government to appeal to international aid agencies for help.

Last year, floods along the entire course of the Indus River and its tributaries, from the foothills of the Himalayas to the delta lands by the Arabian Sea, inundated one-fifth of Pakistan’s entire land mass, killing 2,000 people and driving 20 million from their homes.

So far, this year’s flooding is on a much smaller scale and is restricted to southern Sindh province, with isolated incidents of flooding in eastern Baluchistan and Punjab province.

Still, the impact may be as devastating as last year, further undermining confidence in the Pakistan government’s ability to handle a crisis, while harming the lives of millions of people who had not yet recovered from last year’s disaster.

“The magnitude of the calamity is worse than our expectations,” Zafar Qadir, head of Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority, told a news conference in Islamabad this week. “We are facing difficulties with every passing minute,” he said.

Continued monsoon rains are hampering relief efforts, making it difficult for aid workers to help flood victims who can only be reached by helicopter.

When last year’s floods ended, Pakistan’s government, which was already relying on an US$11-billion IMF loan to stay afloat, found itself facing repair bills worth more than US$10-billion for damaged homes, bridges, roads and other infrastructure.

A full year later, Oxfam reported that more than 800,000 people remained homeless, while other aid groups estimated up to 1.4 million people, mostly in portions of Sindh that have now been flooded again, continue to be totally dependent on international food aid.

This summer’s flooding has devastated areas of Sindh that were just beginning to recover from last year’s disaster.

An International Red Cross report, sites the example of the Khairpur district of Sindh, where people had just begun to rebuild their homes and were waiting to harvest their first crops since last year’s flooding.

“Today, Khairpur is under five feet of water and the floods have destroyed areas of ready-to-cut cotton crops,” the report says. “The roads and streets are impassable and it is almost impossible to reach neighbouring villages.”

The renewed devastation destroyed dreams of recovery.

“The floods have come again and literally taken the food from their mouths,” said Senator Nilofer Bhaktiar, chairwoman of the Pakistan Red Crescent.

Desperate to avoid being criticized, for a second year in a row, for being indifferent to the plight of flood victims, Pakistan’s government has appealed to foreign aid agencies to spearhead relief efforts.

United Nations experts rushed to Pakistan over the weekend to draw up plans for distributing food, water and emergency shelter to hundreds of thousands of people who have been driven from their homes.

Some 2,250 emergency relief camps have already been set up for the homeless, but tens of thousands of people remain stranded on high ground with nothing but what they salvaged from their now flooded homes.

On Tuesday, flooding spread to Pakistan’s financial capital, Karachi, as the city received more than 10.2 centimeters of rain, forcing schools, businesses and the stock exchange to close early.

The International Red Cross says more than 16 million people have been affected by extraordinarily strong monsoon rains across South Asia this year. In some cases rainfall is three times higher than normal.

Floods have caused massive disruptions in India, Bangladesh and Nepal as well as Pakistan, the Red Cross says.